I stepped into the shadows, and found them occupied. A woman moved between two horses, brushing their glossy black coats. She was taller than me, and still in a travelling cloak, hood shadowing her face. Her dress was black, in some style foreign to me, and all I could see of her was glossy black hair that masked her face, falling loose from a sharp centre parting, inky deep and bright as glass.
‘It’s rude to sneak up on people.’ She spoke without looking at me and I startled.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but I didn’t leave.
‘What do you want?’
She must be the maid of a politician’s wife, who thought little of us backwater people, sent to tend a prize horse. Or a village girl called into to fill a vacancy and unpractised in deference.
‘Somewhere to hide,’ I said.
At that, the woman glanced up and I caught a flash of eyes as jet-dark as her hair. ‘Curious. A princess in hiding.’
‘I’m not a princess.’
I wondered how I could speak so plainly to her. My throat was dry, my stomach hollow, and yet the words left my lips without volition.
‘But youarehiding.’ She took a comb and worked it through the knots in one beast’s mane. She moved through the shadows like she was one of them, like smoke.
‘Yes.’
‘Which begs the question, what are you hiding from?’
My stepmother would punish a servant for speaking like this, even to me. Perhaps I should warn this woman before she fell foul of her.
But my words dried up. I remembered, instead, my mother’s face peering under tables and behind curtains, looking for me. We had been playing a game, but I had hidden too well. I was hungry and ached from folding myself tightly into the gap between a settle and an armoire and the light had turned cold with dusk. I wanted the game to be over, but my mother had not found me yet. I wanted her to find me more.
She never did. I climbed out at dinner time, and she didn’t ask me where I’d been.
‘Do I have to have a reason to hide?’ I asked, then looked to her horse. ‘A beautiful creature.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied. I caught the glint in her eye, the corner of a smile, and I blushed.
‘Excuse me for intruding.’
‘Good luck hiding,’ she called after me as I hurried past the mounds of saddles and bridles and tack.
I had the acute sensation of walking past the mouth of a cave, smelling the hot, rotting breath of the monster within.
IV
As the sun sunk behind the mountains I dressed for dinner. It was the first in my stepmother’s schedule of events. Between negotiating sessions, the men would go hunting for wild boar in the forest, and the evenings were given over to dinners, cards, and on the final night a grand assembly towhich my stepmother had invited half of the German-speakingworld. All talk of the Witch was banned within the palacewalls. This week my father was a modern German, and wewere all ordered to be so too. However risky the timing, thiswashis opportunity and not even the Witch would be allowed to threaten it.
I decided to make an effort. I had a new evening dress in soft heather-coloured velvet with a three tiered underskirt, the overskirt drawn up full over the bustle to be held in place by cloth roses and ruffles; the off-the-shoulder neckline exposed my décolletage and I wore only a thin black choker. My hair was piled onto my head, arranged over several rats and hairpieces to make me look something like fashionable. I was not a beauty, I knew that much. Cheeks always red from so much time outdoors, the high dome of my forehead always burned, hair bleached blonde by the sun and so dry it clouded out around my face with each stroke of the brush. There was only one feature I liked – my eyes. Blue like the slices of agate my father had given me on my tenth birthday, sharp and watchful even when hidden behind the little wire-framed glasses I wore when I read.
I caught sight of myself in a mirror as I went downstairs and my heart sank. A beautiful dress on an ugly woman still made an ugly woman.
Drinks were underway and I slipped in, making myself acquainted with a glass of schnapps as soon as possible. A gong sounded, and my stepmother began to bring the pairs together to lead us down to dinner. Klara and my father were paired and positioned, and my stepmother was leading her partner into the line. I chewed the side of my tongue. I had been given no partner. Had I missed some communication earlier telling me who I should be with? I scanned the room but saw no spare man.
I drew up beside my stepmother. ‘I’m not sure who I am to escort,’ I said quietly. I knew enough not to draw attention to myself.
She turned away from her conversation, brows knitting together in confusion. ‘Mina?’ She took in the completed line of guests, and me, outside it, and went pink beneath her rouge as her mistake hit her. ‘You cannot expect me to keep on top of every minor detail.’
I swallowed against the hot lump in my throat. There was no one for me to go to dinner with, because there was no place for me at the table. She had forgotten me. ‘Should I have Cook send me up a tray?’
‘Whatever you want to do.’ She offered her arm to her partner and turned her back on me.
The guests crossed to the dining room and I did my best to slip away unnoticed. I felt too hot and cold at once. I climbed the stairs two at a time, trying to outrun the shadow that curled around my edges.
